Event Information

Date and Time

Location

Refund Policy

Refunds up to 7 days before event

Event description

Description

Our fifth #RebootingWebOfTrust Design Workshop on decentralized self-sovereign identity technologies will be held in the Boston area on the 3rd through the 5th of October, 2017, at IDEO's offices at 80 Prospect St, Cambridge, MA 02139, right in Central Square.

Over the last year and a half, the #RebootingWebOfTrust community has published almost twenty collaborative white papers, technical specs, and code repos, with another half-dozen expected this summer from our successful fourth design workshop, which ran in Paris last April. The focus of all of our events has been on decentralized identity, including technical models, reputation systems, smart contracts and more. We've had high-level users tell us about practical use cases and applications, and we've had engineers create technical specifications and code.

Some members of the #RebootingWebOfTrust community have taken our efforts and turned them into projects that have received VC funding, while others have brought in over $1M in stage 1 and stage 2 SBIR grants from the US Government. The technology specifications incubated at our events are also moving toward acceptance in W3C and IETF as international standards, while one company has had their code accepted as a Hyperledger project. The terminology of “Self-Sovereign Identity” created at our design workshops is now being used broadly as the future of identity by many identity organizations worldwide.

FACILITATED DESIGN WORKSHOP

This English-language, three-day facilitated event will use the same format as the previous successful #RebootingWebOfTrust Design Workshops in San Francisco, New York & Paris. We will work together to produce white papers and specifications intended to influence the future of decentralized trust and self-sovereign identity through the establishment and promotion of new identity technologies. Full documentation of the prior events is available in the Web-of-Trust Info GitHub repository — including photos, drafts, graphic output, and previous White Papers.

The design workshop is intended for developers, cryptographers, researchers, user-experience designers, and policy experts who are actively involved in building a next-generation web of trust. However we are also seeking the participation of those who have a need for decentralized technologies, to ensure the diversity of the event.

"I was really thrilled with this design workshop. The participants I met there are brilliant, I got a good long peek into the future, and this collection of thought leaders is definitely designing the next big thing at warp speed. Also, the event provided an ideal sounding board for my ideas, allowing our team to refine them substantially. This is the place to be, if you seek to become a thought leader in this next quantum leap toward the decentralized digital future." — Moses Ma, FutureLab

ANTICIPATED WORKSHOP OUTCOMES

Collaboratively create the least five technical papers or specifications on topics that will have the greatest impact on the future.

Showcase the scope of use cases and requirements for decentralized identity and trust.

Explore tools that could be useful to developers, researchers, and funders.

Discuss and suggest approaches to the adoption of these technologies.

ADVANCED READINGS

A 50-75% discount code is offered to participants who write one-or-two-page advanced reading (or to alumni who update their previously submitted advance reading) to share with other participants. These advance reading can include:

A specific problem related to identity or trust.

A discussion of why current solutions such as PGP or CA-based PKI can not address the problem.

A specific solution using decentralized identity or a web of trust.

Specific questions not addressed by current solutions.

Examples of advanced readings from previous #RebootingWebOfTrust Design Workshops are available in our Github repos. They are due by September 17th to allow other participants to read them before the event. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

WEB-OF-TRUST: THE ORIGINS

The term "Web of Trust" dates back twenty-five years to PGP, where the "Web" referred to a distributed network of systems and the "Trust" was limited to the validation of keys. It revealed the need for decentralization and recognition on the internet.

Today, those needs remain, but the Web of Trust has grown larger, encompassing the creation, authentication, and verification of self-sovereign identities as well as privacy protection, reputation assessment, smart contracting, and more. The blockchain has come to be one of the most interesting and new tools for these tasks.

"The web-of-trust that began in Pretty Good Privacy was more than 'pretty good' in 1991 and even in 2001. However, as we approach the 25th anniversary of PGP, it is time to take the lessons we've learned and the new cryptographic technologies we've created to take a fresh look at the problem. I'm looking forward to collaborating to create a new foundation for next 25 years of the web-of-trust." — Jon Callas, former CTO of PGP